


Poet

by seazu



Series: That's Life [4]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 11:33:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10512930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seazu/pseuds/seazu
Summary: Mickey gets a start as a song writer while he's a teenager, and keeps it largely secret. Just like the crush he harbours for his sister's best friend, Ian Gallagher. Except he can't help his feelings leaking into those chart topping songs Ian keeps humming.Part of the 'That's Life' series -- a handful of unrelated AUs based on the song by Frank Sinatra.(You don't have to have read any of the others to read this one)





	

Mickey didn’t think much of it when he wrote it, just another angsty teen doing some bullshit poetry assignment for English. Needless to say he never turned it in because that was just fucking embarrassing. It was easier to steal lyrics from online and hand those in like it was an original work. Even if he got caught it would be far better than handing something genuine in.

It stayed pinned to his wall for two weeks before he hated it. So he fixed what he hated about it. At fourteen he was at an age where he changed his mind so rapidly that he felt he had evolved years beyond where he was last week, every week. His bullshit poetry assignment became an obsession, something he wanted to perfect, because nothing was perfect in his life. His mom was dead, his dad was an asshole, his brothers were pricks, his sister was annoying as shit, and his home life was unbearable. Everyone regarded him with disgust or fear, he easily preferred the latter, but it isolated him. He was _just another Milkovich._ Just another worthless piece of shit here to cause trouble, and it was easier to fit the stereotype than rebel against it.

But this poem, it was his small rebellion. Proof he could be good at something, he could craft something worthwhile, he could make something he could be proud of.

~

Iggy played guitar. He jammed good with Colin and Jamie sometimes. And the Flies from Venus. That’s what they called their shitty band. When they were out he stole his guitar, it was a piece of shit and always sounded out of tune no matter how much he tried to change that. Nothing to do with his bad playing. Nothing to do with the fact that Iggy was left-handed and Mickey had no idea that that made a difference. He gave up on that pretty quickly, until he scraped together enough money from selling weed to other kids at school to get his own from Goodwill. It was a beat-up old acoustic but it was a hell of a lot easier to learn with.

He found charts online, practised until his fingers were raw and it became too painful to press on the strings, and then he started practising again the next day. He was shit, but he was trying. It was more than could be said for most else in his life. For a Milkovich, crime came pretty easily, it was creativity or academics where they struggled. But they weren’t exactly pushed to it either.

In a couple of months, his poem was a song. It was one he could barely play himself, which was frustrating because in his own mind he could hear the perfection in it but when he tried it came out a mess.

In a fit of rage he scribbled down chord charts and bits of tab, as he understood them, over the lyrics and shoved it in an envelope with a hastily written letter and posted it away. Like if he got rid of it, once and for all, he could just get back to being the failure people were accustomed to. Let it be someone else’s problem. He didn’t think about it for weeks after he posted it, to his favourite band, the people he looked up to and who had guided him through his own angst as many teenagers claim.

It was gone, that was all that mattered. There was a gap on his wall where it used to hang, and that was the only reminder. Until he got a letter. The last thing he expected. The kind of shit that only happened in bullshit Kerrang! stories. A letter from that band, asking to meet him when they were touring next month. Two tickets, a backstage pass and a phone number to call and arrange things.

Now what kind of bullshit is that? Unbelieveable, right?

He didn’t have anyone to take, so he sold the other ticket and made a bit of money off the back of their gesture. He called the number from a payphone because their bill was rarely paid and the phone almost never hooked up. He was actually going to have coffee with them. Sit down and talk about the song.

Even when he was sitting there in front of them he couldn’t play it cool. They say: never meet your heroes, but these guys didn’t disappoint. They were the perfect mix of awesome and appreciative of fans. Told him they loved it. Threw around phrases like “offer you compensation” and “rights to the song” and “full credit” but he was just stunned the whole time. He’d agree to anything at that point. It wasn’t until a long time later that he figured out that a one-off cheque is a bit of a rip-off when you can get royalties but when you’re fourteen years old and faced with your heroes and being told that you’re not worthless, that actually, here is some money and we’ll play your song. Your name will be on the credits. You’ll be a part of this.

Fucking hell, that was pure nirvana.

~

It snowballed over the next few years. A few other band representatives contacted him about getting songs written. Which was daunting as shit but when he looked at that spot on the wall where his bullshit poetry assignment used to hang, replaced with an old cheque and his ticket stub and pass… he realised he could do it. He was capable. He wasn’t shit. He got an agent who handled all the bullshit for him, so he could just lock himself away and deal with the creative side. The writing and obsessing and fixing and shit, the thing he was actually good at. Something genuinely good, and not illegal.

He didn’t blab about it, no one in South Side would get it, but there was a sort of twinge of pride any time he heard one of his songs come on the radio. It calmed the storms, and kept him sane. Because no matter what shit anyone flung at him, he had this to ground him. He was solid and capable and he could take anything on. The only people who knew were Mandy, and later Iggy. Mandy, because she fought with him all the fucking time but still took an interest because he was her big brother and probably one of the most tolerable. Iggy because Mandy told him everything when they got older, and closer.

Honestly it was nice for someone to know, someone to share his pride. And even if they teased him, they only had to say, “no shit I fuckin’ love that song” once, and it was all balanced out. The warmth it brought him inside was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It allowed them all a degree of freedom, too. A few years down the line he had a steady enough income that the three could get their own place. Mandy and Iggy couldn’t exactly offer to chip in as much or as consistently as Mickey could but he preferred it to living alone. It was good to be out from under their father’s thumb, too. Though the place was a fucking mess most days, and Iggy’s stoner buddies were always over making it worse, or Mandy had her friends over for pre-drinks or movie nights.

He spent more and more time isolated in his own room, never really had managed to find a clique, was only ever close to his own siblings and extended family. Never really got the whole social thing down. Even into his twenties he kept mostly to himself. Not that he became a hermit or anything, Iggy never really got a “proper” job, so he spent any time he wasn’t out dealing, around the house, and Mandy gave up the waitress job for the freedom of being an escort, which was weird but fine, she earned more money for less work, so he’d pull his faces but didn’t say anything.

~

“Justin is _definitely_ not gay.”

“Oh please, of course he is.”

“I used to have a poster of him on my wall!”

“So did I! Doesn’t make him less gay.”

Ian Gallagher was no stranger to the Milkovich family. Mandy had him over more than any other friend of hers, though he’d seen him less frequently in recent years, he at least knew him enough that he could breeze through a conversation like that and not take any heed.

It didn’t stop him looking Ian over while he waited in the kitchen for the microwave to finish heating up his TV Dinner.

Ian looked up at him, with a sort of dazzling smile that took Mickey by surprise and he raised his eyebrows in response, hoping to deter him. Somehow Ian was the only person who didn’t take one look at Mickey and just see _another Milkovich_. Didn’t regard him with disgust or get that look like he’d just smelled something awful. Definitely didn’t fear him either. Somehow exposure to their family over the years had made him totally immune to Mickey’s challenge.

“Are you seriously eating that shit?” he asked, tilting his head as his grin turned mischievous.

“Yeah? You got a problem?”

“It’s not even real food, it _can’t_ taste good.”

“Yeah well, it’s this or order in, and this is faster.”

Ian’s eyes slid to the timer on the microwave and that satisfied him for all of twenty seconds. “You still haven’t learned to cook, what age are you now, man, twenty-three, twenty-four?”

“Twenty-four,” he snapped, “and I don’t need to learn to cook, ain’t you seen those Just-Eat ads?”

Ian snorted, and rolled his eyes, “you can’t make _anything? ”_

“I can make eggs, and I can make pancakes. And toast.”

“I’m not sure any of that counts.”

“Pancakes count,” Mandy interjected, “he’s actually not bad at most things you can do with a frying pan.”

“Gee, thanks,” Mickey said, but that was actually a pretty solid complement coming from her.

“Yeah? Well maybe I’ll have to try your pancakes some time, Mick, judge for myself if you can cook.”

Mickey’s eyebrows raised up in the face of that and Mandy smirked, punching Ian’s shoulder, “can you _not_ flirt with my brothers all the time, I can’t fuckin’ take you anywhere.” Mickey’s eyebrows somehow raised higher and he was so caught off guard by that that he was uncharacteristically stunned into silence. But Ian just smirked and turned back to the TV, not bothered by the pointy-knuckled punches his sister threw him.

By the time the microwave bleeped, and he was carting his steaming hot tray of shit to sit with them in the livingroom and endure another viewing of _Friends With Benefits,_ the joke or whatever it was seemed to have been forgotten. And it was just another evening of them sitting watching TV together. He didn’t really understand the twinge of jealousy he felt when Iggy turned up and sat on the other side of Ian to Mandy, though, and the three of them just looked like a comfortable little family. He didn’t stay any longer than it took him to finish eating, dumping out the tray and washing his fork before he locked himself back in his room for the evening. Back to writing.

~

He hadn’t really written a love song before. Or a lust song, or anything that focused on that trope of romance in any form. Always thought there was enough of them in the world, and he never really considered himself an expert on it. But he found himself particularly inspired the next time he sat down to write. It flowed from him with more ease than he remembered feeling with anything else he’d written. But then he’d never been the guy to come to for these sorts of songs so he just sent it to his agent and asked them to find the highest bidder.

They sold it faster than he thought they would, fuck he owed so much to his agents. He should send them a fuckin’ fruit basket or some shit. He considered this twice as hard when they got offers for him to write more along the same line.

~

“The fuck are you humming?”

“I duno, it’s been on the radio all week, stuck in my head, now.”

“Sounds like shit, fuck whoever wrote it.”

“Hey! I like it! Maybe I will, just to show my gratitude!”

~

It’s not like the crush thing was new, not really. It wasn’t like he loved Ian from the first moment he saw him either. It was just one of those things that grew on him, slowly, over the years. Maybe it started with anger that he was always around, maybe it spread into frustration when Ian never backed down against his challenges. Maybe by the time he realised he was easy on the eyes and kind of fun to hang with, it was too late for him to dig the feelings out. They were rooted.

Mickey had long come to terms with the fact that he was into dudes. It wasn’t something he felt the need to tell anyone, but it was obvious to him since his thirteenth birthday. When Terry’s big ‘you’re a man, now’ celebration landed him face to face with a whore, who’d ‘ _teach him a few things’_. It was one of the most terrifying experiences of his life, but he knew it wasn’t that he was scarred and just afraid of women or whatever bullshit people spouted about fags. It was just that they didn’t do it for him, couldn’t get his dick hard like when he thought about dudes.

Definitely weirded him out the first time he watched two guys fucking, in some threesome porno he’d found while scrolling through redtube and assumed that meant two girls and a guy, but nope. Two guys and a girl, and not even spit-roasting her. She loomed over them, ordering them to do whatever she wanted -- probably one of those _for her_ porn fantasy things, but he couldn’t look away. And when he jerked off, he ain’t never cum so hard. That was about all the evidence he needed. Shame is shame, but a good orgasm trumped the self-loathing for the most part.

Point is, he usually stuck to the belief that his thing for Ian was generally a proximity thing. He was the guy he saw around here most who wasn’t related to him and who was pretty openly gay. That’s all it seemed to be and he managed to convince himself of that for a long time. But somehow that TV Dinner bullshit was the first time he’d registered Ian actually flirting with him. It was unexpected and probably just him teasing because he thought Mickey was straight or would pick a fight -- but what he felt sink into him then just cemented what had been building up over the years, and he was pretty powerless to stop it.

But if he wasn’t going to act on it he could at least use it for work. And people were eating that shit up, finally breaking into the more mainstream artists and getting songs in the top 40 - which did well for him, so he wasn’t complaining.

~

“Are you fuckin’ kidding me?”

“Could you fuckin’ knock,” Mickey said, holding his hands up, so fucking done with the lack of privacy in his own fucking house.

Mandy completely ignored that and dropped onto his bed making it bounce. “I heard your new songs.”

“Okay?”

“You’re in love with Ian.”

“What the fuck, no I ain’t. The fuck are you talking about?” he was immediately on defence, brow furrowed as he scrambled into a sitting position and pulled his covers up to hide the fact that he was naked.

“Everyone’s seen your tiny dick, Mick, no one gives a fuck. Wait, _has_ everyone seen it. Has Ian seen it? Because if he has this has gone way too far. Are you fucking my best friend and you haven’t even had the decency to tell me you're gay? I mean it’s obvious but, what the fuck?”

Mickey’s eyes widened as he tried to take that in, eyebrows sailing off to space while he processed. “The fuck are you talkin’ about?”

She threw down her evidence like a proper lawyer, printouts of some of the songs he’d done recently with bits highlighted, he scanned over them quickly, and she waited with her arms crossed.

“Alright Nancy Drew, spill it.”

“Oh come on Mickey, it’s pretty obvious who this is.”

“I wrote half of these for chicks, Mands, can’t make them all dykes.”

“Fuck you, don’t give me that bullshit, you always write about your own fucking tortured existence.”

He rolled his eyes and looked away, then crossed his arms, “alright, I ain’t bangin’ Ian, and-- wait, what do you mean _it’s obvious_.”

“Eugh Mickey, come on, I’m you’re sister, I’m not blind. We talk about it all the time.”

“ _We_?”

“Me and Iggy.”

“What the _fuck_.”

Mandy rolled her eyes and stood off the bed, “no one gives a fuck, Mick, but if this whiney pining bullshit sticks around, your songs are gonna be banned from this house. Sort your shit out.”

~

It was something his agent told him to do, but he didn’t do it often. The music he wrote was mostly private to him, not that his name wasn’t credited to it once it was sold and out in the world, but even if someone did look it up, and saw his name, he knew they would think it a coincidence. No one in their right mind would connect the songs with him. Standing in front of an audience with just a mic and his beat up old guitar was different, though.

It was why he went to tiny bars way out of South Side. He didn’t want to see anyone he knew, maybe occasionally his brother and sister would be there, but very rarely because he got awfully fucking pissy after shows when he saw them there. He got better at guitar, but he never improved much as a singer, voice stayed low, mostly never ventured out of his one comfortable octave range, and even the extreme ends of that were a bit much most days. When he played, he tended to keep his eyes on his hands, keep his head down, it was all very internal, but it wasn’t half bad. And if people assumed he mostly did shit covers, he didn’t care. It was a way of testing stuff out before he sent it on, a chance for some tweaks when he realised something didn’t work.

Tonight was no different, people told him watching him play felt like intruding on his thoughts. Or like he was practising and didn’t realise anyone was listening. The reason he looked so fucking timid was because the spotlight was exactly what he didn’t want. Even a crowd of two was too many. All he wanted was to be good at something and to be paid for it. This was too vulnerable for him, but he knew it was a necessary evil on occasions.

He played a handful of songs, mostly newer stuff, which meant a shift from angst to sop, which made it all a bit harder. And yet somehow easier. Because a lot of the things he was writing about were still fresh in his mind, it allowed him to put a bit more feeling behind the words. When he finished up he set his guitar aside and stepped off the platform and away from the light to go pick up his pay from the bar - which was a free drink,by the way. But he caught sight of Iggy and Mandy on the way, and pulled a face, which dissolved as soon as he saw Ian. Fuck. Shit. _Assholes._

“The fuck are you three doin' here?”

Iggy grinned in that sort of soft peaceful way he managed, which on any other Milkovich tended to look more shit-eating in tone. “Here to support our brother, obviously.”

“Yeah, Mickey, you’re lucky you have us, always here for you,” Mandy added, slurring a little.

“Did you actually have to get fuckin’ wasted just to listen to me?”

“Absolutely not,” Mandy said, raising a finger but her eyelids wouldn’t move more than halfway open, “but it does help.”

Iggy sniggered and patted Mickey on the back a few times.

Ian had been quiet up until this point but seemed to want to throw Mickey a bone, while he stood there infuriated by the betrayal, “I didn’t know you played, Mick, you were great up there.”

Mickey looked away, feeling a bit like the wife who gets bought jewellery when she’s pissed off at her jackass husband. Except Mandy and Iggy are his husband and Ian is the jewellery trying to sway him from his anger. “Thanks,” he said a little begrudgingly. Pretty sure it’s bullshit, but still.

“Didn’t know you were a Rihanna fan, either,” Ian added, a hint of teasing to his voice.

“What are you talking about, that’s Mickey’s song,” Mandy said, and _there’s_ the trademark shit-eating grin.

“Oh yeah, sure,” Ian said, rolling his eyes and laughing, “and I wrote Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Mickey threw Mandy a warning glance but she completely ignored it, “no he did though, look it up, he wrote all those songs.”

“ _Mandy_ ,” his tone was dangerous enough to make her shut up, and even Iggy looked a little uncomfortable. “Fuck you-all,” Mickey said, moving away from them to go sit at the far side of the bar. He was set on staying there until the place cleared out. It was a good run at least. A good ten-ish years of Mandy’s silence before she let the cat out of the bag. Maybe Ian would just forget this and things could go back to normal again, like after he flirted. Maybe.

A hand on his shoulder made him jump a little, fist ready to swing before he saw Iggy’s face, “sorry man, she just got a bit too involved.”

“The fuck does that even mean.”

“She told me you’re crushing on Ian? And she’s pretty sure he likes you, too, so we hatched this whole plan but she had a bit too much while you were playing and… it wasn’t supposed to go like this.” Mickey was still processing that as Iggy placed a joint on the bar in front of Mickey and nodded once, slowly, like it was a fucking peace pipe. But he wasn’t gonna say no. Though he was just stuck trying to get over how little they seemed to care that he was gay. If he’da thought it would have played out like this he might have actually told them a long time ago and been done with it. Fuck. “Anyway, we’re heading back if you wanna come?”

“Nah I’m… gonna hang around.”

“Kay. Don’t get into too much trouble.”

Mickey quirked an eyebrow.

“Or do, just don’t come home angry, she didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No promises.”

~

Almost a week passed without him hearing anything from Ian. He wasn’t saying shit to Mandy either. Iggy was Switzerland, so he at least was spoken to when it was necessary but Mickey felt betrayed. Ambushed by the people he thought had his back.

Their attempts at building bridges weren’t doing more than pissing him off, so it was easy to snap a, “fuck off!” when his bedroom door knocked.

But then Ian poked his head in, “hey.”

Mickey felt ambushed all over again, pushing himself up his bed and almost using his guitar as a shield. “The fuck are you doing here?”

“I uh… I looked up your songs? You’ve got a fucking tonne man, you must have some work ethic.”

“Not really, just been doing it a long time,” he spoke slowly, watching Ian as he moved into his room, cautiously.

“I like your new stuff - catchy as shit, man. I’m always humming those, was wondering why it drove Mandy so crazy.”

“Can’t blame me for getting songs stuck in your head,” he said, shifting his position again.

“They really about me?”

Mickey glanced away, feeling heat rise in his cheeks and really fucking wishing he had some control over bullshit reactions like that.

“Mick, if you liked me you could have just said -- you didn’t have to go write a bunch of songs.”

“Might as well profit somehow,” he said, looking back at him.

“You ever try just talking to people instead of just writing it all down, you’d deal with a lot more shit.”

“You come in here to play therapist or some shit, Gallagher?” he said, tilting his head up.

Ian pursed his lips and was quiet for a moment as he looked Mickey over in a way that made him squirm, “move that guitar out of the way and I’ll show you what I came in here for.”


End file.
